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This all seems so weird, and the list of Board members doesn't make this any easier to understand. Apart from the 3 insiders, there are 3 other board members. 2
by crop_rotation 3y ago
This all seems so weird, and the list of Board members doesn't make this any easier to understand. Apart from the 3 insiders, there are 3 other board members. 2 of them seem complete no names and might not qualify for any important corporate board. In a for profit shareholders in theory control the board, in a non profit I am not even sure of who really has control over things.
- nikcub 3y agoThree other people have left the board this year: Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd and the person from Neuralink.
- dougmwne 3y agoThe board does and they are not supposed to have a financial stake in the non-profit. Usually they just vote their friends on. Welcome to the loony tunes that is nonprofit management. Clearly Microsoft staked its whole product roadmap on 4 random people with no financial skin in the game.
- crop_rotation 3y agoThat does sound like loony tunes. If the board elects itself then I think it is a very very bad arrangement for something as important as OpenAI.
- 0xDEF 3y agoThat is one problem with non-profits. They end up with completely unprofessional leadership because they hire their friends who are crazies just like themselves. When things cool down in a few months we will learn Altman and Brockman were some of the few sane people on the board.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago> Usually they just vote their friends on You actually think that for-profit corporate boards are significantly different, especially in the startup/early IPO phase?
- crop_rotation 3y agoBut those are people who have some skin in the game right? And shareholders can change the board structure right?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoI was at amzn when jeff formed the first board. No skin in the game, and no shareholders with any votes. I gather this is pretty typical.
- crop_rotation 3y agoBut Jeff was the shareholder and those were his nominees right? Not to mention he was mostly able to pick the board as needed. In for profit corporation there is a clear ultimate ownership in shareholders. No such thing here.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThe claim was that non-profits "just put their friends on the board". No difference.
- dougmwne 3y agoSure, the investors own the company and the board answers to them. Nonprofits are significantly disconnected from their own financial incentives. I have witnessed it at every nonprofit I have worked for.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adastra22 3y agoIn the early stage the investor does not own the startup. 20-30% stake would be typical. Hence why a Series A investor usually demands a board seat and special considerations.
- anon291 3y ago> I am not even sure of who really has control over things. Honestly, this is the big problem with Big Non Profit (tm). The entire structure of non-profits is really meant for ladies clubs, Rotary groups, and your church down the street, not openai and ikea.
- adastra22 3y agoikea is a non-profit?!?
- betaby 3y agoYes. https://www.fastcompany.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-yes-thats-every-bit-as-fishy-as-it-sounds https://www.fastcompany.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-...
- underseacables 3y agoIKEA is the world's largest nonprofit. https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-accounting https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-acco...
- erk__ 3y agoI think the Novo Nordisk foundation is the largest now. It owns a majority of both Novo nordisk and Novozymes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation
- adw 3y agoIkea has the wildest legal structure, but yes, a lot of IKEA is technically owned by a couple of "nonprofits" which happen to pay out a lot of money to the Kamprad family.
- ipqk 3y agoThe same way that Rolex is technically a non-profit. Complete bullshit legal wrangling.
- hnthrowaway0315 3y agoMaybe non-profits are just frontends of some three letter agencies :)
- __loam 3y agoAre we going to start speculating about insane conspiracy theories now?
- askonomm 3y agoKnowing what some of those three letter agencies have gotten caught doing, I'm not so sure this particular one would be so insane.
- crop_rotation 3y agoThat doesn't seem insane to me in this case. OpenAI is easily the most important non profit for any Government in the whole world.
- __loam 3y agoThey don't need you to be their pr department. Their products are based on research done at Google and Meta, they're not the only ones working on this and they're also one of the smaller players in the space.
- crop_rotation 3y agoI never made any of the points you are contesting and my point still stands. And they are not a smaller player in this space, they are the most well known player.
- krapp 3y agoGovernments will have their own black-budget private LLM networks, they don't need OpenAI. The NSA probably has a whole cluster of them in its data center in Utah, trained on every public and private communication they've slurped up over the years, likely a generation or two ahead of what's available to the public.
- underseacables 3y agoSort of remind you of the Silicon Valley Bank board
- synaesthesisx 3y agoWhat I find incredibly odd is the lack of a Microsoft board seat, considering their large ownership in OpenAI. Something does not add up.
- dragonwriter 3y agoMicrosoft has zero ownership of the entity the board controls (the OpenAI nonprofit), and a for-profit firm having seats on a nonprofit board especially if it was because they invested in a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit would raise serious issues of the “nonprofit” being run for purposes incompatible with its status.
- 015a 3y agoSure; but its still weird that Microsoft agreed to the deal with the board in the state that it was; not just no board seat, but three absolute outsiders, two of them extremely unqualified. We may look back on their decision to buy 49% of OpenAI as a big misstep.
- SXX 3y agoMicrosoft got access to their IP and capitalized on it. Likely it's already brought them more than $10B they paid.
- tyre 3y agoAnd much of that money is/will be spent on Azure. That’s incredibly valuable data and return on investment
- philipov 3y agoHow much did they pay for that 49% stake?
- speedylight 3y agoSomething like $10 billion.
- 0xDEF 3y agoThere is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree and is part of some kind of cultish "singularity" spiritual/neo-religious thing. That individual has also never had a real job and is on the board of several other non-profits. What the hell were they thinking? Just because you are a non-profit doesn't mean you should imitate other non-profits and put crazies on the board.
- crop_rotation 3y agoThe only explanation I can find is that their importance went through a step function at the launch of ChatGPT, and before that it didn't matter who was a board member.
- markus_zhang 3y agoSmells like XYZ agencies, or some white gloves.
- astrange 3y agoNo, all native Californians are like this (this just replaces hippie Buddhism with hippie computer worship) and the singularity stuff is the reason OpenAI was founded in the first place. And the reason Elon is mad at them, because they pivoted from it.
- markus_zhang 3y agoThanks, love the insight.
- j45 3y agoHippie computer worship seems like indirectly self worship as the creators.
- vyzU9AjsoQe 3y ago[flagged]
- j45 3y ago
- DebtDeflation 3y agoSee my comment above. I don't think OpenAI's absurd corporate structure will survive this.
- indymike 3y ago> in a non-profit I am not even sure of who really has control over things The board is in absolute control in a not-for-profit. The loophole is that some have bylaws that make ad-hoc board meetings and management change votes very difficult to call for non-operating board members, and it can take months to get a motion to fire the CEO up for a vote. In some not-for-profits, the board often even manages to recruit and seat new board members. Some not-for-profits operate as membership associations, where the organization’s membership elects the board members to terms. On the few not-for-profits where I was a board member, we started every meeting with a motion to retain the Executive Director (CEO). If the vote failed, so did the Executive Director.